by Loretta Fontaine, reprinted with permission from The Crafts Report
By early evening, the translucent structural entrance erected in front of the Seventh Regiment Armory on May 29 was glowing softly against the darkening sky. A well-dressed group paid $500 each to be the first admitted, giving them two hours to snap up pieces from the 52 international galleries inside before the rest of the crowd entered.
Welcome to SOFA New York. At SOFA, which stands for Sculpture, Objects, and Functional Art, the Ferrin Gallery of Lennox, Mass., premiered and sold out all 12 of Sergei Isupov’s new ceramic statuette series, offered at $8,000 to $10,000 each.The Gallery Na Jansken Vrsku of Prague sold Stepan Pala’s glass sculpture for $35,500. Moderne Gallery of Philadelphia sold a rocking chair of stack-laminated walnut and suede by Wendell Castle for $17,000 on the secondary market.
The artists at SOFA are renowned in their fields of glass, ceramics, metal, fiber and wood. Most no longer sell their own work but rely on gallery representation — which doesn’t mean they don’t attend SOFA.At this show, the artists are invited guests who hope to discuss their work with collectors who travel across the country to see it. The galleries have the booths and take care of the sales.
The event and the art are exceptional
As befitting a major art event, no expense is spared in presenting an exceptional show. Inside the entrance, designed especially for SOFA by architect David Ling, was a stack of thick, glossy, show catalogs. Each gallery displayed their artist’s work in stunning, hard-wall booths, and breezy fabric banners floated over the carpeted aisles.
The armory has no air conditioning of its own, but two tractor-trailer trucks, humming with cooling equipment, sat on a side street. Black tubes snaked from the trucks into the armory, providing the perfect temperature for both art and patrons.
The crowd swelled to 1,000 at 7 p.m. when the $125-ticket holders entered the event benefiting the American Craft Museum. Collectors, artists, museum curators and gallery owners filled the aisles.
Forty New York City restaurants were recruited to provide food in the theme, “The Art of the Sandwich.” A waiter from Le Cirque enticed passersby with sandwiches of smoked salmon, cream cheese and chives. Sylvia Weinstock Cakes displayed petit fours on silver trays draped with mountain laurel branches.The women punctuated their chic, mostly black, outfits with kinetic necklaces or colorful brooches. Everyone clutched glasses of wine and champagne as they admired the scene.
SOFA is where artists and collectors meet
Each booth at SOFA is a microcosm of an art gallery. The work, handmade and one-of-a-kind, often loses its functional basis to become purely sculptural.Steven Weinberg, wearing a resin necklace resembling lemon Jell-O, posed with his wife for publicity photos in the middle of the show floor.
“Magellan Boat,” cast glass by Steven Weinberg.
SOFA organizers arranged for luminaries such as Weinberg, Wendell Castle and Dante Marioni to pose with art jewelry. Weinberg bantered with the photographer and held a picture of his 7-week-old son to his chest as the next flash popped.
Weinberg, a glass artist, has work in the permanent collections of over 30 museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
He has exhibited at SOFA since its beginning, and compares the opening night gala to a wedding — all the same familiar faces in the art world, good friends and good food. “It’s really about touching base with a lot of people who support you, who collect your work,” Weinberg says, “You want people to know what you are doing currently.”Weinberg described three boat forms displayed at SOFA from his present series entitled “Boats and Buoys” as, “vague interpretations of the cross sections of hulls.”
His work sat on white pedestals in the Leo Kaplan Modern booth. The elegant arcs of cast lead crystal were mesmerizing studies of the optical power of glass. Smooth concave prisms ground in the crystal magnified the precisely suspended bubbles, and scattered the texture of the crusty bottom surface within the forms.
Weinberg received his MFA in glass from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1979. With 25 years in the field, he says his studio in Pawtucket, R.I., is “a well oiled machine” with one part-time and two full-time employees.
“[Working today] is very different from when I was just out of college, did all-nighters right up to the deadline and then drove the work to the gallery,” says Weinberg. “I can’t do that anymore. I have a family at home, four boys. I have defined hours that I work and within that time frame I need to get a body of work out.”
On opening night at SOFA, Leo Kaplan Modern sold all three of Weinberg’s pieces. Weinberg says gallery representation frees him from worry about marketing. “Selling is just something I should not be doing — no artist should be doing,” Weinberg says. “I don’t want to be dealing with clients and collectors directly other than in social situations as the opening [at SOFA].”
Jeweler Lisa Gralnick, another SOFA veteran, arrived and immediately delved into rearranging her pieces in the display cases of the Susan Cummins Gallery booth. Sporting a shock of brown hair, an infectious laugh, but never jewelry, she is always an animated presence.Gralnick balances teaching metals at the University of Wisconsin at Madison with her studio work. She has a loyal base of collectors who have followed her as she pursued different series of work, starting in black acrylic jewelry, to wearable reliquary pieces, to intricately fabricated rings in gold.
Brooch made from sheets of 14k gold, by jeweler Lisa Gralnick.
Her latest work, showcased at the opening, is a reflection of her love of the freshness and spontaneity of the paper models she uses as prototypes with her students. “There is a certain irony in it for me,” Gralnick says of her new designs. “Paper models are always planned for a piece, the thing you do before, but not the piece itself. I see myself now as making gold models for paper pieces.”
Gralnick’s brooches are fabricated from thin sheets of 18k gold. Folded and elegantly scored in strong radial designs, their surfaces shimmer with a calm, reflected light.
The evening at SOFA was bittersweet for Gralnick as Susan Cummins had announced she is closing her gallery this year. “I’ve been with Susan for a long time, 14 years, and she has been an extremely important person in my life and my career,” says Gralnick. “She handles everything in terms of promoting my work and selling it and giving me the freedom to focus on making it, and to focus on teaching, which is a part of my life.”
SOFA events are where Gralnick meets her collectors. “Very few of my sales that Susan Cummings does actually come directly out of the gallery (in Mill Valley, Calif.),” Gralnick explains. “They come from a national network of people that Susan has nurtured over the years that are interested in my work.”
Mark Lyman, a bearded man who calmly surveyed the scene at the SOFA opening, started as an artist and teacher. In 1993, he founded SOFA with several partners in Chicago to enlarge the market for contem-porary decorative art. The group started a second venue in New York City in 1998. Lyman initiated an educational program to work with his events. “We had a commitment from the beginning,” Lyman states, “for presenting educational lectures and exhibitions within our events because it is very important to get the message out about the work.”At the show, Lyman offered 17 lectures to the public on subjects ranging from carving glass by Japanese artist Toshio Iezumi to a panel discussion on collector genius.
Emerging artists bring new faces to SOFA
The galleries at SOFA showcase established artists, but are always on the lookout for new talent. Leslie Ferrin, of Ferrin Gallery, saw the work of Laura DeAngelis while traveling in Missouri.DeAngelis arrived at 10 p.m. on her first SOFA night because she waited for her sister who was late at work. Fresh-faced, wearing a long black satin skirt and her hair upswept in two neat buns, she looked the part of the belle of the ball. “It’s a bit shocking,” she says of the event.
“Twin Sisters,” by artist Laura DeAngelis, sold on opening night of SOFA New York.
In the Ferrin Gallery booth DeAngelis was amused to note her name spelled incorrectly as “DeAngeles” on the tag next to her work.
After graduating in 1995 with a BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute in Missouri, DeAngelis renovated a downtown Kansas City building into living quarters and a studio. When the studio was finished she taught adult education classes and immersed herself in producing a series of ceramic circus sculptures. Working intensely, her friends joked that she left the studio only to walk her dog.DeAngelis volunteered to work on the committee planning the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts conference in Kansas City in March 2002. She was encouraged to put up a solo show in town during that event and all but one of her pieces sold.
Ferrin called DeAngelis and asked her to ship the leftover piece to New York. “Twin Sisters” features two female figures with uplifted palms in pink frocks on the broad back of a circus lion with a sublime gaze. DeAngelis fired the piece six times, each time adding another wash of colored engobe, finishing with a final firing of simple wood ash glaze.“Twin Sisters” sold on opening night of SOFA to a Manhattan woman with a prominent art collection.
By late evening, the crowds started thinning out and heading home, and a tray of crumbs was all that was left of the petit fours. DeAngelis and her sister walked up an aisle, soaking in the show while chatting and planning time to look at the entire show in the next few days.The New York Times noted in a review of SOFA the next day, “In the end it doesn’t matter if you call it art or craft; presence is what counts, and it can be found in nearly every booth.”
Loretta Fontaine is an Albany, N.Y., jeweler who writes on the arts.
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